What Kobe Bryant Misses Most About Obama

Ben Strauss is the co-author of Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA, winner of the 2017 PEN/ESPN award for literary sports writing.

During the summer of 2012, Kobe Bryant was in Washington with Team USA for an exhibition game. Interested in the inner workings of President Barack Obama’s digital strategy, he set up a meeting with the president’s digital director, Macon Phillips. Bryant met Phillips, along with Kyle Lierman, who led sports outreach for the White House, at the Ritz Carlton and Phillips walked Bryant through the tenets of online organizing.

“What I took away is that they had run this campaign where what they stood for was connecting people,” Bryant told me. “And in the digital age, you can multiply that message.” Bryant joined Twitter several months later. He now has nearly 12 million followers.

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After announcing his retirement in 2015, Bryant visited the White House on another trip to Washington. He and Obama talked at length about the end of the current chapters in their lives. Bryant would soon be moving on from basketball, Obama from public office. Bryant understood new challenges awaited him and Obama, who understood celebrity as well as anyone on the planet, was someone he could learn from. “In sports, you get better by working in the gym,” Bryant said. “I wanted to know how he got better, from managing his schedule to what he reads. And because he gets sports, and we can talk about that, too, it makes it easier to have that connection.”

Obama was famous for his love of basketball, even scrimmaging with pro players on occasion. And the players, in turn, were fascinated by his world, as eager to participate in the political process in which he performed at the same elite level. Throughout Obama’s second term, Bryant often texted White House staffers ideas for campaigns, such as how to reduce gun violence among children. "What are you going to put in their hands when you take away the gun," a White House staffer remembers him saying. "Is it a basketball or a book?" He wasn’t alone among NBA stars who established strong mutually beneficial relationships with Obama. LeBron James, often outspoken on social issues, got a personal appeal from the president to do a health care public service announcement in 2014. Stephen Curry filmed a video with Obama to promote a mentorship program.

Today, with Obama out of the Oval Office, the NBA—perhaps more than any other professional league—has become an incubator of dissent. Several coaches have vigorously denounced President Donald Trump; after the CEO of Under Armour, one of Curry’s sponsors, called Trump an “asset to the country,” Curry said he agreed with the sentiment, if you removed the “et.” That activism could become even more prominent soon. As James’ Cleveland Cavaliers and Curry’s Golden State Warriors square off in the NBA Finals—the Warriors lead two games to none—the possibility exists that neither team will visit the White House, if invited.

“Obama didn’t inspire someone like Colin Kaepernick (the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who knelt during the National Anthem last season),” Bryant said. “But he did help athletes progress beyond just asking questions or just being angry, and asking why something is the way it is. Like what’s the constitutional reason behind something and what can be changed.

“He made locker rooms more politically aware,” Bryant continued. “Conversations changed. Obviously, now with the violence we’re seeing across the country, that’s something athletes are understanding more and more. He was rare. We all miss him to a certain extent.”

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Basketball was part of Barack Obama’s identity long before he ran for president. The sport helped the young law school graduate relate to his new community when he moved to Chicago’s South Side. Later, it become critical to his political image. Pickup games on the campaign trail, as Alexander Wolff writes in his book, The Audacity of Hoop, “undermined Republican efforts to portray Obama as foreign, suspicious, or someone who ‘pals around with terrorists.’” For his 49th birthday, the president scrimmaged with a Dream Team-esque roster of stars—James and Magic Johnson, among them.

Obama took political advantage of his associations with famous basketball players, says Harry Edwards. A sociologist, Edwards has mentored athletes from Tommie Smith and John Carlos—the sprinters who raised their fists on the medal stand at the 1968 Olympics—to Kaepernick on social activism. “When you get the coolest guys around—that’s high-profile athletes—it rubs off on you,” Edwards said. “There was a transfer of cool status to him.”

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The flip side was that athletes suddenly had a friend in the White House who asked them to lend their voices to public policy debates. Coupled with the ability to communicate directly with their fans through social media, it was a potent pairing for political speech.

“When I went to the White House nobody cared,” said Craig Hodges, a former NBA player, who wore a dashiki and delivered a letter on inequality to George H.W. Bush when the president welcomed the Chicago Bulls for a visit in the early 1990s. “But the NBA is part of the resistance now. I don’t know if that happens without Barack.”

Indeed, in recent years, athletes have become increasingly vocal—a world apart from when Michael Jordan is reported to have famously quipped that “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” Two years before his health care PSA, James and his Miami Heat teammates posted a photograph to Twitter of all of them wearing hoodies and the hashtag #wewantjustice in honor of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, who was shot and killed in Florida. (James, Bryant and other players also wore T-shirts during warm-ups with the message “I Can’t Breathe,” the last words of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man killed by a police officer on Staten Island). But it was in 2014, with the White House in scramble mode a few months after the failed launch of Healthcare.gov, that the president personally appealed to James for help.

James was visiting the White House to celebrate the Heat’s championship the season before, and Lierman, the White House staffer, reminded the president before the visit that this was his chance to make an in-person appeal to James. Yet James almost left without the big ask. Instead, as James and his teammates filed out of the Oval Office, Obama called out, “LeBron, I’m going to text you about something.” The appeal—even by text—worked. Soon, Lierman was down in Miami shooting the video.

Two years later, Curry filmed a video with Obama to promote a mentorship initiative called My Brother’s Keeper. Obama gave Curry tongue-in-cheek pointers on his shooting form, they played Connect Four and worked on a volcano science project. “How do we know he won’t get hurt when this thing explodes,” the president, genuinely worried, asked his aide, Alex Yudelson, before the shoot. The volcano bubbled without incident, and 30,000 new volunteers signed up to be mentors.

When James’ Los Angeles house was spray-painted with the N-word last week, he told reporters, “If this is to shed a light and continue to keep the conversation going on my behalf, then I’m OK with it.” The sentiment had some parallels with Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech in 2008—an effort to have the same conversation about race in the United States. “When you are connected to the president, it legitimizes serious involvement in the issues,” Edwards said.

Obama’s cultivation of athletes went beyond the NBA. Richard Sherman of the Seattle Seahawks attended the White House Correspondents' Dinner and did his own health care PSA with teammate Russell Wilson. One association that has been easy to make is that athletes, particularly in the NBA and NFL, are black and Obama was the first black president. While that certainly is part of the dynamic, the connection was much deeper, said Joe Briggs, public policy counsel at the NFL Players Association. “It was about the issues, too,” he said.

In 2010, for example, Antonio Cromartie of the New York Jets had trouble naming all of his children on the show “Hard Knocks.” When the clip went viral, players were concerned about the image it portrayed and the NFLPA—through the White House—connected with the Department of Housing and Urban Development and arranged for players to attend Father’s Day events at public housing complexes around the country. Health care reform also resonated with football players, Briggs said, because so many have pre-existing conditions after their careers. Then there were initiatives like Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign, that promoted sports and brought partnerships with pro leagues.

Briggs pointed to the number of former NFL players who have run for office in recent years. He mentioned Henry Lawrence, a 65-year-old former Pro Bowler who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. House in 2014. This year, Colin Allred, a former linebacker who retired in 2010, is trying to unseat Pete Sessions in a Texas House race. “There’s a direct line from Obama to these guys,” Briggs said.

***

Donald Trump has his own coterie of supporters in the world of sports. New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and coach Bill Belichick have spoken glowingly of Trump. He has received support from others sports figures, including Bob Knight, Rex Ryan, Mike Ditka, Mike Tyson and Don King. Jim Brown visited Trump Tower during the transition, and Trump has golfed with Ernie Els and Rory McIlroy. Just last weekend, Peyton Manning was at the Trump National Golf Club with the president. But none have advocated for tax reform or the president’s travel ban.

The rhetoric coming out of all corners of the NBA about Trump, meanwhile, has been unsparing. After the election, San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich delivered a blistering tirade. “I’m sick to my stomach thinking about it” he said, adding, “My big fear is — we are Rome.”

Warriors coach Steve Kerr, whose father was murdered in 1984 by an Islamic jihadi during a stint as president of the American University of Beirut, spoke out harshly against the immigration ban. “If anything, we could be breeding anger and terror,” Kerr said.

When the Patriots visited the White House in April after their Super Bowl win, a handful of players declined to participate, citing politics. Now James and the Cavaliers or Kerr, Curry and the Warriors will face the same choice. (It should be noted that Obama also faced some backlash from athletes. Tim Thomas boycotted a trip to the White House when the Boston Bruins went in 2012).

Edwards has spent time in numerous locker rooms in the past year, including the Seahawks and the Warriors. “People went to the Bush White House,” Edwards said. “But this guy is so absolutely repugnant in his policies that it goes against so much of everything the NBA stands for. More than football and baseball, it’s an international league. Players aren’t going to the White House to put the imprimatur of cool on this man.”

Hodges was more magnanimous. He once tried to get Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson to boycott an NBA All-Star Game, but the visit to the White House, he said, was a chance to represent the black community. “When you get that platform, it makes you—whether you want to be or not—an ambassador for your people,” he said. “The more constructive move is to go and tell him you’re there on behalf of the disenfranchised.”

When I asked Bryant if he would go, he paused for a beat before answering. “I probably would go,” he said. “That visit is more than how you feel about the current administration. It’s about the guys next to you, about the flag, about the kids out there who look up to you and the United States. But, honestly, it’s a tough call.”